Jesus Lopez
Holograms are gimmicky. There are exceptions, but most holographic art that I’ve seen has been dominated by the almost hypnotic illusions of depth and movement. And for many of us, a mere optical trick is not “art.”
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Some of his art-school training can perhaps be seen in two images that reflect the cubist idea that no single view of a subject is complete. In Flash Girl, a relatively static image of a woman is juxtaposed with an image of the same woman whose head moves when the viewer does. Sensual Virtual Reality superimposes 88 different film frames of the same woman–for his source images Lopez films his models in 16-millimeter–producing multiple views of parts of a woman’s body. But what’s effective about Sensual Virtual Reality is the way these multiple images combine without the harsh collisions of a cubist painting, blending together with preternatural smoothness.
Most of Lopez’s holograms are 8 by 10 inches; some are smaller, and a few are 12 by 16. Candy for Your Eyes uses its larger size powerfully, if disturbingly. A woman is seated in profile, eyes closed and head resting on a raised knee. Step slowly to the right, and her body seems to rotate toward you. A bit more to the right, and one eye opens and looks out. Walk a step further, and just as the viewing angle becomes steep enough that the entire hologram is about to vanish, her eye closes again. This little narrative of viewer frustration, unfolding in a few footsteps, nicely expresses the impossibility of grasping any fantasy image. Nurture it and it will grow on you; ask too much of it and it promptly disappears.
For example, Hunt creates a complex relationship between the base and body of a six-foot-tall silver-colored untitled sculpture of welded stainless steel. The base begins as a triangle made up of metal sheets with parallel ridges forming a grille of horizontal lines (these plates, Hunt told me, were once part of a dairy plant’s milk-cooling machine). Near the top, two edges seem to peel away to reveal additional faces of similar material, two with ridges and one with tiny metal buds–an almost humorous disruption of the parallel lines. The sculpture that this base supports is made of polished silver surfaces that erupt into jagged edges and acute angles, the reflective surfaces contrasting with the almost violently colliding shapes. Yet most of these surfaces form nearly horizontal planes, echoing the base’s neat parallel ridges. At its top the work transforms itself again: two large, petallike pieces jut out, one pointing upward and the other to the side, an organic bloom growing from a junk heap.
Many people–among them regular art viewers and not a few artists–have never accepted abstract art. “What does it say to me?” is the common question. The connection between Staff of Life II and Hunt’s more abstract pieces provides one answer: forms that seem to grow plantlike out of each other are linked to daily life. But abstract forms also serve, in Hunt’s work, as metaphors for different ways of seeing, different kinds of thinking, and different states of being. The ambiguous central space in Arc Held Tangents creates uncertainty by suggesting colliding concepts, evoking contradictions that can blur perception and even identity.
